After a decade of ruling over India unchallenged, the Hindutva saffron flag is starting to lose its luster. Despite winning a third term, Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) witnessed a strong and unexpected resurgence from its subdued opponents. As a result, it is projected to win less seats in the Lok Sabha than it did last year, it will not be able to form a government on its own .and will have to rely on unreliable coalition partners. Meanwhile, a numerically strengthened opposition riding on high morale will press its advantage at every turn.
Modi’s fanciful slogans of crossing 400 seats in the Lok Sabha to have the ability of amending the constitution on a whim have fallen flat - the RSS-BJP master plan for the South Asia is now firmly stuck in a rut. While Hindu nationalists crawl back into party offices to lick is wounds, India’s minorities – especially its 200 million strong Muslim population – will be breathing a sigh of relief.
They may be still stuck under the Modi boot for another 5 years, who is bound to return to his policy of religious communalism and oppression with a vengeance, but small details in the election results are proving that India may just be starting to buck Modi’s ultra national yoke, and beginning to aspire towards the pacifist, pluralistic, multiethnic, and syncretic nature of its historical existence.
To name a few, BJP lost in Ayodhya, the city at the center of Hindutva rhetoric for decades. This is the city where the Babri Masjid was demolished, and where the Ram Mandir is under construction. This city, and this incident are the lynchpin of modern BJP politics, yet that same city rejected the party. Similarly in Varanasi – the holy city of Hinduism on the banks of the sacred Ganges River – where Modi contests his personal election, the margin went down to a little above a hundred thousand, down from the whopping half a million lead it had been 5 years ago. In other constituencies, popular Sikh and Kashmiri leaders, often victimized by the law, have be elected to the Lok Sabha. Further surprises like this are expected as the dust settles on the historic election.
In the succinct words of Rahul Gandhi, Modi’s main opponent, “The voters have punished BJP. It is clear message.”